THE AUSTIN FIRE DEPARTMENT’S SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROGRAM: AN ASSESSMENT
The Building Austin’s Standard in Customer Service (BASICS) program, introduced in 1990, has produced successes and challenges. The following are among the generalized positive results: Innovation has become the norm; teamwork has replaced independent actions, rivalries, and turf battles; information sharing has replaced information hoarding; and coordination and cooperation have created an environment where separate divisions can work toward common objectives.
The program also has helped the Austin Fire Department to accomplish some specific goals. Many industrial locations do not like to report small hazardous-materials spills to their local fire departments. Industry resents the unfavorable community attention when fire departments respond “hot” when the problem is under control. Fire departments assume that industry always “downplays” the severity of the incident. Austin redesigned its hazardous-materials response around the needs of the customer.
The change—resulting from meetings between leaders of the local semiconductor industry and a team of representatives from the department’s fire prevention, communications, and training divisions—involved adding a third response level for nonemergency reporting of hazardous-materials incidents required by law: a single hazardous-materials unit that uses no lights or sirens. This response is used only under the follow ing conditions: when extremely hazardous materials are not involved, the spill or leak has been detected quickly and stopped, none of the material has been released into the environment, and no injuries have occurred.
The improved relationship between the Austin Fire Department and the semiconductor industry — referred to as a “safety partnership”—also hits resulted in increased on-site tours by the department’s response and dispatch personnel (who make the initial response decisions), funding of some of the department’s training by the industry, use of the fire department’s drill field by the industry’s emergency response team, and simulated incident drills at the industrial site. Chemical Safety Associates, Inc. assessed the department’s new haz-mat response policy as one that “makes a significant contribution to improving communications and reporting.”
Other key parts of the new program include an industry education program that addresses the topic of when a hazardous-materials incident must be reported to the fire department. In addition, an ongoing public education program informs residents that the presence of the fire department does not indicate that the industrial site is a danger to the community, but rather that industry management is committed to ensuring that appropriate emergency actions are taken before an incident becomes unmanageable.
The Austin QualityCouncil, a cooperative effort of the City of Austin, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, and the University of Texas, developed a Quality Award competition patterned after the prestigious Malcom Baldridge Award on the national level. The program emphasis is on encouraging continuous improvement in the quality of service offered to customers. The Austin Fire Department was selected as the city’s entry in the government category in the 1991 competition and was one of nine organizations recognized “for significant progress in the pursuit of total quality.” Chief Bill Roberts accepted the award in October of 1991, saying: “For the Austin Fire Department to have been chosen to receive this award along with organizations such as IBM and Motorola recognizes the significant strides the City of Austin hits made toward total quality management. While not the highest honor, this recognition is a tremendous honor and is consistent with our own assessment of our progress.”
THE CHALLENGES
Getting employees to “buy in” is one of the challenges Austin’s City Manager Dr. Camille Cates Barnett cites with regard to the Building Quality Service program. If I could change one thing about Austin’s Service Program, it would be the last word in its name, program. Program is a dirty word in most organizations, and management is largely to blame. We charged ahead with ideas that we thought were workable without sufficient examination. We introduced programs—-there’s that word again — with the best of intentions without consulting those who would be most affected, without following up on their progress or following through on our initial commitments. We introduced new programs without giving appropriate attention to the implementation phase of “marketing” our ideas and without attention to the basic principles of change management.
Some problems can be avoided bycrediting the service that already exists. It is offensive to an emergency service employee, for example, to suggest that he or she is not alreadydedicated to community service. An effective implementation strategy acknowledges that management already knows that community service is valued by department members and that all can be proud that the department is a professional and dedicated organization that works to improve the many varied services it provides to the community on an ongoing basis.
- Experience and technical expertise, coupled with a fair dose of professional ego, sometimes get in the way of a successful customer service program. Ihe “we-knowbest” mentality can thwart progress. The fire service, for example, identifies ventilation holes made in a structure as effective fire control. The property owner, on the other hand, might view the same holes as excessive destruction. Although the customer’s logic may be different from ours, we must realize that it can be equally as valid.
- Another error commonly made when introducing a new program is failure to follow through. Employees can see past the lapel buttons and bumper stickers, and they will ask, “What’s really changed around here?” Hie follow-up and evaluation phase of the program should be as planned and as carefully orchestrated as the introduction; it should not be an afterthought.
Your organization may find it helpful to identity the new initiatives as extensions of more familiar, existing procedures. Avoid mixed messages. An entertaining story told in the Austin Fire Department goes back many years to when dry chemical fire extinguishers were introduced in the department. The training staff developed a detailed lesson plan concerning their use, every company was told about the value of dry chemical as an extinguishing agent, and a rack was installed on the apparatus to hold the extinguisher. After all that, the companies then were told not to use the extinguishers because it cost too much to recharge them!
One way to avoid sending mixed messages is to “walk our talk.” leaders must provide the example. If employees can rely on their managers to model consistent behavior, they also will modify their behavior to be more consistent. That is what encouraging quality service is all about.
In Austin, quality service is a value, not a program. With the introduction of quality service management, we have only begun to take advantage of the improvement possibilities.
